The Letter That Should Have Been a Lawsuit

1 Corinthians 1:2 "To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours."

When Mark Twain was sixty-nine years old, he sat down at his writing desk in New York City and dictated one of the most famously brutal letters in the history of American correspondence. The recipient was a man named J. H. Todd, a San Francisco salesman who had mailed Twain a leaflet advertising a patent medicine called The Elixir of Life. The leaflet claimed the elixir could cure meningitis and diphtheria.

Meningitis had killed Twain's daughter Susy in 1896. Diphtheria had killed his nineteen-month-old son Langdon in 1872. His wife Olivia had died the year before from heart failure. Twain himself was in poor health and writing from inside a season of accumulated grief that would have crushed almost anyone.

He read the leaflet. He picked up his pen. And he wrote.

He called the man who wrote the advertisement "the most ignorant person now alive on the planet." He called him an idiot of the 33rd degree. He told him he hoped he would take a dose of his own poison by mistake. He signed off with three sharp Adieus and let the secretary mail it.

The letter is taught in writing courses today as a masterpiece of righteous fury. And it is. Twain had every right to it. The man on the other end of that letter was peddling a fake cure for the very diseases that had taken Twain's children.

Now hold that letter in your mind, and turn the calendar back about 1,850 years.

The Apostle Paul is sitting in a room in Ephesus around AD 55, picking up his own pen to write his own letter. The recipients are not a lone snake oil salesman. They are a whole church. A church Paul himself planted, poured 18 months of his life into, then watched fracture from 250 miles away.

The reports that have made their way to Paul are catastrophic. One of the men is openly sleeping with his stepmother, and the church is so proud of how tolerant they are that they haven’t confronted it. Members are suing each other in pagan courts. Some are still visiting prostitutes. They have split into competing fan clubs over their favorite preachers. The wealthy show up to communion drunk while the poor go hungry. Some are denying the resurrection. The worship service has become so chaotic visitors think they have lost their minds.

If anyone has earned the right to write a Twain letter, it is Paul.

Read what he writes instead.

"To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints..." (1 Cor 1:2).

Saints.

These people. The ones drunk at communion and suing each other and sleeping with their stepmothers. Paul calls them saints. Not future saints. Not saints in waiting. Saints. Right now. Today. Already.

This is what we have to feel before we read another verse of this letter. The first word God has spoken over His people is not the verdict their behavior has earned. It’s the name His grace has given. The Greek Paul uses for sanctified is hēgiasmenois, a perfect passive participle. Perfect means it is a finished action with ongoing effects. Passive means it was done to them, not by them. They did not make themselves saints. Someone else made them saints, and the verdict is permanent.

Most of us have been carrying a lie for years. The lie is that our standing with God is determined by our latest performance. Good week, God smiles. Bad week, God pulls back. Worst week, God reconsiders the whole arrangement. We’ve been auditioning for a name we already have.

Paul will eventually correct the Corinthians. He’ll spend sixteen chapters on it. But before he names a single sin, he names them. Before he confronts what they’ve done, he reminds them Whose they are. The fastest way to fix a fractured church is to remind it Who it belongs to. The fastest way to heal a divided heart is to remind it what it cost to make it His.

Today: What’s the name your worst week has been speaking over you? Failure. Hypocrite. Fraud. Addict. Adulterer. Disqualified. Now read 1 Corinthians 1:2 and let the Spirit speak louder than your week. The God who could have written you a Twain letter wrote you this one instead: Saint. Sanctified. His.

Prayer: "Father, forgive me for letting my worst weeks tell me who I am when You’ve already settled the question. Hold the name You gave me at the cross over my heart today, louder than every accusation. In Jesus' name, Amen."

-PK